George Washington commissioned the first lighthouse on Cape Cod in 1797, built on a 125-foot clay cliff in North Truro — and the Cape has been fighting to keep its lights standing ever since. The coastline here doesn't hold still. Erosion drove the Gay Head tower back from the Aquinnah cliffs in 2015. It pushed Sankaty Head inland in 2007. In 1996, Highland Light moved 450 feet west in 18 days; that same year, Nauset Light — already a transplant from Chatham, moved to Eastham in 1923 — was hauled 336 feet back from a 70-foot cliff edge. Chatham's light has been rebuilt twice and lost one of its twin towers to that relocation. The pattern is the same everywhere: the shore advances, and the keepers move the light. What the Cape kept was not the original ground but the original purpose — a coast that takes ships seriously enough to keep warning them.
